Unfortunately, the holiday season starting with Thanksgiving Day (26 November, 2020), in the US was associated with a nationwide surge in COVID-19 cases. The advice the CDC was to avoid travel and large gatherings and there is some evidence that, …
at least some, people took that advice on board.
It is evident if you consult the Google and Apple mobility data that in the US movement, particularly, with public transport was significantly decreased relative to baseline. Interestingly, analysis of the global data highlight that even countries like Australia and New Zealand, which have the virus under control, people are very reluctant to use public transport, with number significantly below baseline.
This year many coined the new term “Zoomsgiving”, given the rise of the Zoom video communications platform in 2020. Indeed, the “market” has been very kind to stay-at-home tech, including Zoom, Netflix, Amazon and many others during this pandemic. To encourage “Zoomsgiving”, Zoom allowed unlimited meetings, lifting the usual 40-minute rule. According to some reports turkey sales compared to 2020 decreased by about 60%, and a fun fact is that there was a huge (overwhelming) demand for smaller turkeys this year. If you need entertainment, there are many Youtube videos covering various types of Thanksgiving gatherings.
It is interesting that two “spiritual” events, Thanksgiving Day and GivingTuesday are sandwiched between huge “shopping” days, Black Friday – the weekend – and Cyber Monday. When trying to decipher potential impacts on the progression of COVID-19 it very difficult to decipher exactly what happened. By all accounts, the were less people physically at the “shops”, with decreases around 50% in in-store sales being reported for Black Friday, and similar data for Cyber Monday. It looks like people still did spend money with online shopping; Shopify indicating a 22% increase compared to last year. People spent ~10.8 billion online on Cyber Monday however, conflicting reports indicate a decrease of ~14% compared to last year. The point is… people spent money, and hopefully they have some resources left for GivingTuesday.
Hopefully, the CDC advice was taken into consideration by people to avoid the surge that is predicted by the CDC and health experts in coming weeks. Dr Fauci referred to “A surge on top of a surge” during this holiday period. Leading into Thanksgiving Day COVID-19 cases were hovering at ~170,000 per day. Most likely, given the holiday, 103,104 were reported on Thanksgiving Day reflecting the record-breaking 205,460 cases reported the next day; which appears to be an aberration. Cases topped 200,000 again on December 2, 2020.
COVID-19 cases in the US are now at almost 14 million with approximately 170,000 new cases reported each day, and deaths surpassing 2.5k on December 1 and 2. On November 17, I had made some predictions on numbers based on implementation of mild mitigation strategies; the prediction was by the end of the year there would be ~14 million cases and ~300 thousand deaths. It is clear that the number of cases needs revising to ~15.5 million by the end of the year, and hopefully deaths do not go too much over 300k.
As we know now, safe and effective vaccines are definitely on the way (to be discussed in upcoming issues), and probably best to embrace Zoom parties and other stay-at-home tech for a little while longer. Of course, social distancing and mask wearing are the basic fundamentals for now.
Until next time … Tranquilo Polymaths.